The council reports that, using “mainstream estimates of economic multipliers for the effects of fiscal stimulus” (which it describes as a “natural way to estimate the effects of” the legislation), the “stimulus” has added or saved just under 2.4 million jobs — whether private or public — at a cost (to date) of $666 billion. That’s a cost to taxpayers of $278,000 per job.Mind you these are Obama’s own economists, so the report is like an employee’s performance evaluation that was filled out by the employee. The absolute truth is probably much more bleak.
In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the “stimulus,” and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.
Over ten years, the CBO says the stimulus will raise the federal deficit $830 billion — $43 billion more than originally estimated.
Which brings us to President Obama’s weekly address:
Now, it would be nice if we could keep every tax break, but we can’t afford them. Because if we choose to keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, or for hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners, or for oil and gas companies pulling in huge profits without our help — then we’ll have to make even deeper cuts somewhere else. We’ve got to say to a student, ‘You don’t get a college scholarship.’ We have to say to a medical researcher, ‘You can’t do that cancer research.’ We might have to tell seniors, ‘You have to pay more for Medicare.’Or how about we say to the White House, “You don’t get to spend the remaining $164 billion earmarked for a ‘stimulus’ that is clearly a failure.”
To steal a line from a military recruiting campaign years ago, “it’s a great place to start” — but unfortunately the painfully obvious options never seem to be on the table.
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